The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy, 1997
★ 3.96 from 345.1k ratings on Goodreads
Historical fiction RomanceLiterary fiction
A Kerala childhood, a damp family house, and twins who share one grammar of memory; a novel about the small things that decide who may love whom. The prose is lyrical and close, moving through memory and family grief at a slow, humid pace.
Feels like longing, grief and tenderness. About family, memory and love.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy family stories told in rich, image-heavy prose and are willing to sit with sadness. Some readers find the language demanding and the content unsettling, so it may not suit you if you want a quick, light read.
Why read it
Read it for the sentences and for a child’s-eye view of how families bend around love and grief; the Kerala setting stays with you.
A page from the book
What a house becomes when no one has been living in it.
“It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. The walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against a glistening stone. Hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scummy pond for mates. A drenched mongoose flashed across the leaf strewn driveway. What readers say
Readers find this book emotionally intense and lyrically written, often mentioning love, grief, memory and family bonds. Some are deeply moved; others dislike its difficulty and unsettling content.
Arundhati Roy.Roy trained as an architect before turning to fiction; her debut won the Booker Prize in 1997, making her the first Indian woman to do so.
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Questions readers ask
- Is The God of Small Things for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy family stories told in rich, image-heavy prose and are willing to sit with sadness. Some readers find the language demanding and the content unsettling, so it may not suit you if you want a quick, light read.
- What is The God of Small Things like?
- The prose is lyrical and close, moving through memory and family grief at a slow, humid pace. Feels like longing, grief and tenderness. About family, memory and love.
- What should I read after The God of Small Things?
- If you liked The God of Small Things, try One Italian Summer (Rebecca Serle), It's Not Summer Without You (Jenny Han) and Intermezzo (Sally Rooney).
A taste of the feed
Grief makes a person feel like a stranger to their own life.
I wasn’t in Cousins. Conrad and I weren’t together, and Susannah was dead. Nothing would ever be the same again. It had been—How many days had it been? How many days exactly?—two months since Susannah had died and I still couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t let myself believe it. When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really and truly gone?
It's Not Summer Without You · Jenny Han
Wanting to disappear completely, and to be loved completely, in the same breath.
Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone and in fact I feel that for me this would constitute the perfect and perhaps the only acceptable life. At the same time I want desperately to be loved.
Intermezzo · Sally Rooney
The guilt isn't in the argument; it's in the wanting to leave at all.
“Don’t be rude, Bernard.” She looked prim and he folded his napkin and pushed back his chair. Eating dinner with her always gave him stomach pains. “Where are you going? You haven’t been excused.” As though he were still five years old. He hated coming home sometimes. And then he felt guilty for hating it. And then he got mad at her for making him feel guilty for hating it. . . .
Fine Things · Danielle Steel
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